Development Cycle Archive

Let me say that I like the changes a lot. There are too many aspects of this game that have been dumbed down to allow the lowest common denominator do the same as someone that thinks and works at it. This system will allow those willing to find the best resources make the better final products. Instead of someone who has just hologrinded a profession in a few hours then making the best stuff, it will instead be made by someone that collected the absolute best resource X when it was available 6 months ago.

My only criticism is that this would be MUCH better if you had Miners and Farmers, as then you would have people uniquely equipped to efficiently find and harvest the best of the best resources. I think the fact that SO many players are making their livelihood by being miners and farmers should once and for all disprove your theory that you can't make it fun. Just think if you had put in advanced stuff for them also.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=kettemoor_trade&message.id=35021

Currently 15 locked containers are going for over 100K - holos are what is wrong with the economy!

Long term, this is probably a good change. The pre-patch items will eventually work their way out of the economy. It'll take some time and be fairly painful, but long term it will help to make experimenting a bit more interactive.

However...

I'm not sure this solves some of the key problems in the crafting game, honestly. Part of the issue is that people are by nature min/max-ers. We want the most benefit for the least amount of work. As things stand right now, with the vast majority of items there's really only one experimentation path that's worthwhile. (Unless you happen to be a tailor, in which case there's none whatsoever....*cough*) With weapons, it's about damage. Period. The *vast* majority of the buying public is going to purchase the highest damage weapon they can afford. So if I'm making a DX2, for instance, I'm going to experiment on damage until it's diminishing returns, then on speed if I have points left. (I'm not a weaponsmith, so no specifics, sorry.) It strikes me then that the solution to this particular issue is a reworking of how the attributes are calculated. At the risk of getting lost in the noise, let's go into some detail:

A DX2 has several different attributes:

1. Max Damage


2. Min Damage


3. Speed


4. Health Special Cost


5. Action Special Cost


6. Mind Special Cost


7. Decay Rate


8. Range S/M/L


9. Modifiers S/M/L

Yet we only experiment on 3-4 categories, which effect all of these statistics. What I would propose, then, is that we vastly expand the amount of experimental categories available to accurately reflect the amount of stats effected. Want a pistol capable of doing incredible amounts of damage? Realize it's going to probably have a very wide variance and you may not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with it, but if it hits something... Tripling the number of experimental categories will, of course, mean that the number of points available to experiment should also be tripled. Additionally, if more variance in individual models is desired, require that all experimentation points be expended in one attempt. (This will also boost the Player City specialization of Research Center...) That's an option, and one that probably deserves further thought. I like being able to risk points in small doses, but the resulting variation of items would be valuable as well...

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The other issue at hand is the role of non-Master crafters. Put simply, there's nothing that a non-Master can makewhere a Master can't make a better final product. There's no additional cost to the Master to do so, and so a few Masters can easily dominate a market. The immediately visible solution is to create something that varying levels of crafters can make that Masters either can't or won't be bothered to make. At the risk of horse corpse abuse, one such solution was schematic revocation. For those who don't remember the pre-beta conversations on this topic, schematic revocation did exactly what it sounded like. As a player advanced in crafting trees, they lost the ability to make some of the lower level schematics, ensuring a market for lower level crafters.I came in to beta after the removal of revocation, but have always thought that it was the essential solution to the issue.

Given the outcry that resulted from revocation in Beta, however, I doubt people will find this workable. (It's an interesting facet of human behavior that we want everyone to depend on us while we ourselves remain independent...) What I would then suggest would be a variation of some sort on revocation, though. Perhaps (as was suggested in Beta) a selective revocation. That is, a system where for the appropriate fees a player would be able to gain access to the full database of schematics for their level, but would only be able to download part of those (scaling upwards with advancement) to their datapad at any one time. The cost for database access should be prohibitive of just swapping schematics only the fly. This would ensure that there are some items that are useful for the novice crafter in any tree to have in their datapad and to make and sell.

Should that prove too difficult on a technical level, another possibility is optimal experimentation. By that I mean that there's a certain level of complexity that the individual crafter is best at working with which scales up as one advances. So a master armorsmith is able to work wonders with composite armor, and has the maximum amount of experimentation points available to them. But when they sit down to make a set of bone armor, it's been a little while and so they have only half the maximum available to them. (Yeah, I know it doesn't make sense that a crafter gets worse at making things as he learns new things, but we're dealing with an artificial system. In reality today master craftsmen don't mass produce things because of time limitations. Unfortunately in SWG this isn't an accurate limitation. To accurately model that we'd have to have some kind of annoying system that limited the number of crafting attempt per day, either thought a hard cap ("You get 10 crafting attempts today. Come back tomorrow for more...") or by making the prototype construction take *much* longer and limiting the number of tools that can be in use at once. Both may be realistic, but neither is fun.)

Like I said, I realize I'm at risk for beating a dead horse, but something needs to be done to ensure that there are items that are:

1. In demand


2. Craftable by lower level crafters


3. Either unable or not worth being made by higher level crafters

Thoughts?

If anyone has any feedback on how these changes effect BE's (especially in Clone creation), can they please postit in the Bio Engineer profession forum.

Thanks in advance.

So am I the only person that likes these changes?

Dear SWG Dev team.

I'll make this real simple. Take heed of what your players are saying and drop this ignorant and poorly thought-out change to the crafting system, or start kissing more money goodbye. I will cancel my accounts (yes, multiple accounts) as will many others. I will not sell my accounts -I know that despite your claim to the contrary, you really want people quitting to sell their account so the money keeps flowing in.

My friends talked me into playing this game, assuring me that the gross incompetance that was behind Ever-nerf would not appear here. They were sadly mistaken.

You can not fix the economy by giving more money to the rich. The last few years of the American economy should have taught you that.

If you want people to be on the same level, then fix the stupid crafting system insistance that items made my master craftsmen are the only things worth owning. I know that real work is harder than a quick solution, but putting in real work has the added benefit of notangering your customers.

"BRING DA PAIN, DEVS . . . I CAN TAKE IT!!!"

AMEN!